Anne Midgette
Classical Music Critic, The Washington Post.
The Cultural Questionnaire.
What’s your favorite line from a movie?
I regret to say that the one I have most often quoted is ‘Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night’.
Which movie do you love but would be embarrassed to talk about in a serious, intellectual conversation?
I am usually happy to defend my guilty pleasures, but I suppose admitting how many Disney animated films I have seen in the last 20 years (without children) would come under this heading.
The tune of the moment?
Right now Meredith Monk’s CD Songs of Ascension is in heavy rotation.
Name a museum where you’d be happy to be locked in for the night?
The Hermitage – since I have not yet been there.
The three books you’d take with you for a very, very, very long 100% environmentally friendly trip overseas?
When I was 18 I embarked on such a trip with the complete poems of Wallace Stevens, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Hugo’s Les Misérables in a two-volume set to which my travel companion lost the second volume before I had read it.
If I were going tomorrow, I’d take Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, the Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz, and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, all of which have spent too much time on the ‘to-read/reread’ list.
You can give two “cultural items” (be it a book, a painting, a movie, a record or anything else), one to the person you like the most, one to the person that bores you the most. What would these two items be?
Trying to share personal artistic touchstones is not always successful, but I might give a CD of Maria Callas’s 1951 Mexico City Aida to the person I liked. As for the bore: since I am most bored by the arguments of people who are vehemently closed-minded about interpretive stage direction, I assume this bore is such a person and would give him something to provoke him, like a DVD set of Patrice Chéreau’s Ring production or of the Peter Sellars stagings of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas.
What painting would you steal if you could magically become invisible for a few hours?
A Cezanne still life.
Which artist, alive or not, in any given field, would you love to party with for a wild, wild night?
Ernest Hemingway.
Filed In: Journalism & Publishing
September 14, 2011 at 5:00 pm